Research

Publications & Conference Presentations

Research Projects

Storytelling across the arts, film, media, literature, cultures, and languages (Portuguese, French, English, and Spanish) is an essential component of my research work.

Capharnaum (2018) Nadine Labaki

Refugee’s Figure in Films and Novels

In the last few years, a great number of films, novels, and art projects have explored the theme of refugees and included refugee characters in their narratives. While the media landscape is saturated with images and stories emphasizing refugee struggles, very few research projects in aesthetics and philosophy have sought to analyze and understand this narrative figure and contemporary phenomenon. The reading and scholarly public is hungry, I believe, for an analytical study of film and refugees.

Cinema has long portrayed displaced persons and explored the limitations of the medium in representing unknown spaces. Contemporary filmmakers have sought to depict the condition of segregation and social marginalization that refugees endure, and in so doing have approached the ambiguities and apprehensions of being elsewhere, of lacking a sense of home, and perhaps even a direction. Refugee characters in this sense unfold the unknown without the guarantee of redemption, trapped in restricted, dangerous, and conflictual spaces where time also may be subject to a different definition.

This research explores through the lenses of film, literature, and philosophy (Arendt, Agamben, Deleuze, Bergson, Rancière) how refugee figure shapes contemporary storytelling. Thus, each chapter will explore some recurrent and particular themes through refugee’s figure storytelling following and surveying its narratives and plots.

The Aesthetics of Subtitles in Art, Literature, and Films

Subtitles engage indirectly in the vital matters of foreignness, difference, otherness, and translation. This project focused on film, music, literature, audiovisuals and visual arts – and the artists, filmmakers, and writers that developed their works in the diaspora. The subtitle in a film translates the words, but what about the images? Can images be subtitled? How can filmmakers reconcile text and image? Subtitles mean different things for different people in different contexts. If we talk about subtitles in a film context, “every film is a foreign film” (Egoyan and Balfour, 2004, p. 2) to someone, somewhere. Subtitles point out an idea in translation. How do we translate a piece of art—when behind that art there is an entire culture?

Subtitles in a film, instead dubbing, in
addition to translating the dialogues, can maintain the original language and
sound of the film. In some countries, for economic or political or other
reasons, subtitling is just not “allowed.” By discouraging or prohibiting the
use of subtitles in films, some countries draw attention to the issues of
nationalism. How can subtitled films threaten a national culture? How can
subtitles define media and market strategies? Their
distributors are accustomed to dubbing all foreign films thus denying people’s
access to foreign languages. Subtitles offer the audience a way into distant
worlds, enabling them to experience different cultures and defining for them what
is foreign.

Today with the increasing number of intercultural, cross-cultural and multicultural films, subtitles and foreign languages inhabit the screen and become more and more a part of the aesthetic and even the conception of a film. The film may also be translated for foreign audiences and screenings at international film festivals. Globalization expands the subtitling industry as new demands in inter-lingual practices are created. For example, one single DVD can provide subtitling in several languages. Should we conceive of cultural globalization as a cross-cultural translation that allows the comprehension of work or access to this work? Is cultural globalization a transformation or a creation of the senses? Globalization and new technical filming devices bring new challenges to contemporary cinema. Digital media and subtitles as cultural translation, create a new approach to subjectivity in global cinema.